Have phone, will travel

The other day, my 8-year-old son managed to double my mobile phone bill for this month.

He didn't mean to, and he didn't do anything he shouldn't have been able to do - not within the design of the phone and its software at least. Still, it got me thinking; how do these things happen and how would I have made things differently?

I have a Windows phone, in part because it has a thing called Kid's Corner. Kid's Corner is a special space within the phone where I can control what apps are available and what can and cannot be done. In this space I can disable calls and texts, deny the ability to purchase things and so on. In my set-up I've put a selection of games suitable for a small boy to while away the odd long car journey. On this occasion he was playing Angry Birds Epic.

Now, here's what I didn't know about this particular set-up: Angry Birds Epic has a button that leads to Toons.tv. This is a web space that hosts various cartoons to watch. It's free to access and pretty innocuous. The trouble is, cartoon films take up data, and data over a phone link eventually costs money. And somewhere in this combination of things there was a way that data could be consumed without a consideration of the cost of the internet connection.

Anyway, I'm thinking, as a Product Manager, what was the root of the issue? and what would I have done differently?

First of all I could argue that Rovio, the makers of Angry Birds, could possibly have put some form of security mechanism on the command that accesses Toons.tv - something that would have required my permission to proceed. However I don't think the problem really lies with them; they were offering a free service which under many circumstances (i.e. via a Wi-Fi connection) would have been fine.

I can't really hold the phone service provider to account for this problem either. In fairness they sent me a text to say that I was coming close to my data limit. Of course, I was driving and the phone was in my son's hands at the time!

That leaves me with the Windows phone… Data Sense on Windows lets me do a lot of things to control how data is used. It recognises the difference between usage over Wi-Fi vs usage over a phone service. It lets me put restrictions on roaming usage, on usage whenever I get near my limit, and so on. The problem with restrictions is that when I'm using my phone myself I don't necessarily want to be restricted, and I am happy to pay for additional data if I need to. I know I can change these restrictions when I like, but I don't want to have to mess about changing stuff just for the duration of a car journey with my son.

So why doesn't Windows Data Sense offer the ability to restrict usage when in Kid's Corner? I guess there had been a basic presumption that kids can't use data when in Kid's Corner. After all, I had set Kid's Corner to hide access to the phone, to web browsers and to other data or money-consuming activities. At least, that is what I had assumed… Then I found this comment in the Windows phone user manual:

"Note: If your child taps a web link from an app or game you've added to Kid's Corner, they'll be able to access that web page in the browser and follow any links they find there."

Seriously?!

Back to my thoughts about what I, as a Product Manager, like to think I would do differently… Surely the owner of the phone should be given a choice here? If it were me, my manual would say something like "You can choose how Kid's Corner responds to your child tapping a web link from an app or game. You can allow the link to always be followed, to never be followed, or to be followed only if the phone has Wi-Fi service."

So it goes. Now I'm thinking back over products I've helped to nurture over the years. How often have I miss-defined the handling of edge-cases? Hopefully this kind of situation will help to remind me to keep my eyes peeled when putting together new functionality.

Cheers

Nick